Leseprobe_Festschrift Cohen

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Musical Documentation of a “Forgotten Century” and Beyond INTRODUCTION MUSICAL DOCUMENTATION OF A “FORGOTTEN CENTURY” AND BEYOND In 1968, to inaugurate the establishment of a new Ph.D. program at the City University of New York (CUNY), the chair of this foundling department, Barry S. Brook (1918–1997), invited fifteen distinguished scholars to give lectures on different aspects of the growing discipline of musicology. 1 Providing the first lecture in this series was none other than Gustave Reese (1899–1977), Professor of Music at nearby New York University, founding member of the American Musicological Society, and a distinguished figure in the field. In the course of his lecture, Reese provides an overview of musicology in the late 1960s: its foundations, status and growth in American academia; divisions of the discipline; prominent specializations; and lacunae. 2 Reflecting the postwar musicological focus on music of earlier eras, Reese describes the nineteenth century as a period requiring “an immense amount of work,” summarizing it as a musicologically–“forgotten century.” 3 One of Reese’s students, H. Robert Cohen, took up this charge over the following five decades. Cohen’s efforts brought to scholarly attention a trove of nineteenth-century musical iconography, staging manuals, Italian figurini, and above all, the vast musical press from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. In total, his contributions to the discipline as author, editor, and director comprises some 327 printed volumes, one journal, numerous articles, and four databases which contain nearly two million full text pages, more than a million annotated citations, and treat some six hundred music journals. Howard Robert Cohen was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and studied music in his youth, performing on clarinet and saxophone, absorbing music ranging from orchestral works to performances at local jazz clubs. Cohen attended New York University, obtaining a Bachelor of Arts (1963), Master of Arts (1967), and Ph.D. (1973). Interested in music in nineteenth-century France, specifically the writings and criticism of Hector Berlioz, he traveled to Paris on a Fulbright grant where he pursued much of the research for his Ph.D. dissertation, 1 These essays were collected and published in 1972 by W.W. Norton and republished in 1975 in a paperback edition. Perspectives in Musicology, ed. Barry S. Brook, Edward O.D. Downes, and Sherman Van Solkema (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972). 2 Gustave Reese, “Perspectives and Lacunae in Musicological Research. Inaugural Lecture.” Ibid, 1–14. 3 Ibid., 10. 13
Introduction “Berlioz at the Opéra (1829–1849): A Study in Music Criticism.” 4 Concurrently, he served as a Maître-Assistant professor at the Université de Paris VIII from 1968 to 1972. Owing to the French difficulty in pronouncing Howard (phonetically in French, awaʁ) he began using H. Robert Cohen professionally, to which we now know him. During this period in Paris, Cohen observed les évènements de 1968 firsthand, from both the street level and in the university, where he became perhaps the first person to teach the history of jazz at the Université de Paris and published his first article, on the music of Bob Dylan, who Cohen heard in New York’s Greenwich Village while he was a student. 5 In 1972, Cohen returned to North America when he was appointed to the faculty of Université Laval in Québec where he directed graduate studies and served as Director of the European Studies Program. It is from here that his next foray into archival sources occurred when he happened upon the music iconography published in the French journal L’Illustration. A weekly beginning in 1843, the journal lavishly depicted musical life in Paris and published more than three thousand images depicting musical life in the nineteenth century alone. Cohen’s resulting three-volume catalog and study of the musical iconography in L’Illustration was published under the auspices of the recently-established Répertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale (RIdIM) in 1982 and 1983, a project which received significant critical praise. 6 In subsequent years, Cohen continued to uncover and compile documentary resources. Growing from his Berlioz research, he was instrumental in the foundation and initial publication of the complete musical criticism of Berlioz, published as La critique musicale in ten volumes between 1996 and 2020 (Paris: Buchet-Chastel). Cohen served as co-editor of the first volume and directed the assembly of Berlioz’s original texts. He published volumes studying and cataloging mise-en-scène in France in the 1980s and the 1990s. 7 At the 4 Howard Robert Cohen, “Berlioz at the Opéra (1829–1849): A Study in Music Criticism.” Ph.D. dissertation, New York Univeristy (1973). 5 H. Robert Cohen, “Bob Dylan: His Generation and his Protest.” Les langues modernes 66, 1 (1972): 73–78. 6 H. Robert Cohen, Les Gravures musicales dans L’Illustration de 1843 à 1899. 3 vols. (New York: Pendragon Press, 1982–83). 7 H. Robert Cohen and Marie-Odile Gigou. Cent ans de mise en scène lyrique en France (env. 1830–1930) = One Hundred Years of Operatic Staging in France: Catalogue descriptif des livrets de mise en scène, des libretti annotés et des partitions annotées dans la Bibliothèque de l’Association de la régie théâtrale (Paris). La vie musicale en France au XIXe siècle 2 (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986). H. Robert Cohen and Marie-Odile Gigou. The original staging manuscripts for twelve Parisian operatic premieres = Douze livrets de mise en scène lyrique datant des créations parisiennes. La vie musicale en France au XIXe siècle 3 (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1991). 14
Page 1 and 2: musical history as seen through con
Page 4 and 5: Musical Documentation of a “Forgo
Page 26 and 27: A Ditty for a Friend: Honoring H. R

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